Samsung demos retina resolution 300dpi tablet display

PenTile displays use less subpixels but produce output that is tailor-made for our brains

Samsung has a new 10.1-inch “retina” resolution LCD panel ready to show off next week. It will demonstrate the 2560 x 1600 panel at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium starting Tuesday May 17th. And if you weren’t already thinking it—yes, this is perfect for tablets.

The panel has a resolution of 300dpi, the same as that of print, and the number Apple uses to define its Retina displays. In most uses, the pixels disappear and it appears that you are looking at a printed page.

Samsung’s new panel is interesting for two reasons. First is that it uses PenTile RGBW tech. PenTile is a way of grouping subpixels—each multicolor “pixel” on a screen is made up of several smaller single-color dots. In the case of PenTile, there are five dots (hence the “pent” or “penta” part of the name). The RGBW part means that an extra white pixel is added to the usual red, green and blue ones.

This white pixel works in conjunction with a variable, locally dimming backlight. This ramps up when bright colors are needed, but when colors are desaturated or just black and white, the backlight dims and only the white pixel is switched on. This reduces power consumption by a claimed 40 percent vs. a regular RGB stripe panel.

And that power reduction is the key to its use in tablets. The biggest draw on tablet battery power is the screen. Until a panel exists that can deliver the same battery life as today’s tablets, we won’t see a Retina display in the iPad. Of course, driving all of those extra pixels is also extra work (4x) for the graphics chips, but that’s another problem.

@michaelmarley: I'm sure it will be in Samsung's own tablets as well but Apple already buys a ton of its components from Samsung making this a logical decision on their part. Not only is it a "retina" display, as Apple likes to market it, but it claims up to 40% in power savings over a traditional RGB panel. Apple probably just jizzed in its pants.

I'm not convinced this subpixel technology will look that great. It looks like you have one pixel that can only display red/white, beside one that can only display blue/green. I guess they're quite dense, but wouldn't that make solid colours look strange?

I'm not convinced this subpixel technology will look that great. It looks like you have one pixel that can only display red/white, beside one that can only display blue/green. I guess they're quite dense, but wouldn't that make solid colours look strange?

I don't think the picture is doing this justice. We don't see the RGB pixels now, even on lower resolutions (yes, you can if you get real close and try to find them) so I don't think we'll be seeing strange colors at all.

That, and Sammy makes some of the best screens in the business, I trust them.

I'm not convinced this subpixel technology will look that great. It looks like you have one pixel that can only display red/white, beside one that can only display blue/green. I guess they're quite dense, but wouldn't that make solid colours look strange?

unless I'm misunderstanding the graphic the 2nd/3rd columns are showing one pixel wide lines. I don't think there'd be any artifacting there. You would need to do cleartypeeque anti-aliasing on one pixel wide diagonal lines. AIUI this is the basis of most of the complaints with current OLED pentile displays; with this though the DPI should be small enough that individual pixels shouldn't be visible in most cases which should make it mostly a nonissue.

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

I'm not convinced this subpixel technology will look that great. It looks like you have one pixel that can only display red/white, beside one that can only display blue/green. I guess they're quite dense, but wouldn't that make solid colours look strange?

not necessarily. at 300 dpi, solid colours wouldn't look any different all due to the extremely high density light emitted from an LCD/LED screen isn't all travelling in a straight line parallel to each other, the fact that light will overlap to create new colors is what makes colour display possible. Having said that, the colored light will overwhelm the uncolored light, leaving you to perceive a solid colouring despite miniscule differences.

hold up a magnifying glass to your current monitor, notice the black bands? this wouldn't be any different in that regard :)

That is awesome! Although it isn't 2560x1600 "true" pixels, I think it won't matter at a panel size of 10". Honestly didn't think we'd see such high resolution panels so soon, but I'm pleasantly surprised

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

Yeah, I remember that too, but the screen in the N1 has a lower resolution though, doesn't it? Considerably less than 300 anyway. As far as I can see, it's also a RGBG-screen and not a RGBW.

This sounds like shifting the goalposts to me. If we're going to say that a 'pixel' can contain one white and one blue subpixel, then the headline DPI figure becomes worthless. It's going to be the next '4G', where you're never sure exactly what it means without further reading.

I'm also skeptical about this idea of turning off the colour subpixels and only using the white ones for black-and-white images. First, won't that make the image much dimmer, necessitating a much brighter backlight? Won't there be noticeable gaps between the subpixels (along the lines of the Xoom screen)?

And how local is the backlight dimming exactly, surely not local enough to be able to dim individual pixels (which would require and OLED screen anyway)? I can see where the power savings come when you can dim parts of the screen individually, but I don't see how this subpixel layout makes it any easier or more power efficient.

I have the Motorola Atrix which usesa qHD pentile screen (so not quite retina but close). In my opinion it is great, text is readable even when it is tiny. I have not had a chance to compare it to another similar sized screen with qHD so I cant say how it stacks up, but to me it looks as good as the iPhone 4 screen at my standard viewing distance (2 feetish).

The issue with PenTile that I see is this- show me a diagram that maps software, "square" pixels, to PenTile pixels.

Edit: Found this on the PenTile site posted: "In fact 'pixels' in the traditional sense have been eliminated in PenTile RGBW™ displays; individual subpixels are not restricted to use in one pixel group, but instead participate in multiple 'logical' pixels in their surrounding vicinity."

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

So is the Pentile *technology* new, or is only 10.1 screen new?

It isn't new, it's used on all the AMOLED screens Samsung makes, including the ones on the Samsung Nexus S, Galaxy S, Focus, the Dell Venue Pro and the Apple iPhone 4.

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

PenTile is shit. Which is why Samsung is ditching it for its SAMOLED screens. Now PenTile is back? "PenTile displays use less subpixels but produce output that is tailor-made for our brains". Tailor made to look like fucking shit? TN is tailor made to try and fool our brains. It works for most people, but to many it looks like shit.

- These are not really as good as real 300 DPI displays if each subpixel can't show all colors, and only has two subpixels. At best, they're 150 DPI displays that look a bit better than other 150 DPI displays in certain situations.

- PenTile displays generally look bad. Maybe that won't be an issue at 300 PenTile pixels per inch, but it is a huge issue for regular screens. These are not good displays. They're not built for visual quality, they're built for price and perhaps longevity.

- Apple will very likely never use one of these displays. Apple cares about how its displays look, they don't just care about theoretical specs. Compare the screen on an iPhone 4 (almost a year old) to a Samsung Omnia 7 (a new device) to see what Apple considers a good display, and what Samsung considers a good display.

The iPhone 4 uses IPS tech in its retina display. There is a reason Apple sticks to IPS tech and not pentile tech for its screens. Pentile looks like shit.

Doubt Apple is going to switch to this for the iPad 3. Make no mistake, higher rez is coming to tablets. Just not this tech on the next iPad.

Wasn't it last year that OLED displays were all the rage and everyone was laughing when Samsung and HTC got the jump on Apple with thier Android models at the time? And then Apple introduced the iPhone 4 with retina display but stayed with IPS tech. And geeks laughed at Apple for sticking with "old" tech.

And the general public bought iPhone 4s in droves (still do). And Apple laughed all the way to the bank.

I have a Nexus One with the PenTile display. Not all that impressed -- display is beautiful and all, but text looks just a tad fuzzy as a result. I'm pretty sure Ars commented on this in their N1 review last year.

So is the Pentile *technology* new, or is only 10.1 screen new?

It isn't new, it's used on all the AMOLED screens Samsung makes, including the ones on the Samsung Nexus S, Galaxy S, Focus, the Dell Venue Pro and the Apple iPhone 4.

Apple doesn't use AMOLED. They use IPS LCD displays. The iPhone 4 has a traditional RGB subpixel grouping, not Pentile.

Sure, a RGB+white pixel might look better than a RGB pixel.But de facto the RGB+white pixels are each twice as big, and the resolution is half!

It's a sleazy trick to claim RGB+white is actually two pixels. You might as well say they're four pixels and double the marketing resolution once again. (If they actually did that they'd be laughed off stage... So they're modest and arbitrarily declare half a pixel a pixel.)

PenTile is shit. Which is why Samsung is ditching it for its SAMOLED screens. Now PenTile is back? "PenTile displays use less subpixels but produce output that is tailor-made for our brains". Tailor made to look like fucking shit? TN is tailor made to try and fool our brains. It works for most people, but to many it looks like shit.

"It works for most people, but to many it looks like shit." That doesn't make sense.

That's my guess too. Makes a lot more sense (9.7", AH-IPS, same family as the iPhone's 3.5" display, etc.). Don't know why everyone is so fixated on the Samsung display and tries to make a case for it for the iPad 3.

I'm also skeptical about this idea of turning off the colour subpixels and only using the white ones for black-and-white images. First, won't that make the image much dimmer, necessitating a much brighter backlight?

The white subpixels can probably pass significantly more light the the RGB subpixels, since they are passing most of the full spectrum light from the backlight. When they are ratcheted down to use along side the RGB areas, they are probably passing a lot less than they could, or they would desaturate the colors pretty badly.